“I like Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, a lot.
But, let me warn you right now, that it’s not a Linux for
beginners. That’s not to say that the newest version of Fedora,
Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It’s not. But, if you need a
lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you’ll be better
off with Ubuntu.“To see what the latest and greatest Fedora could do I put it on
my reliable laptop buddy, a Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This 2008-vintage
notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500
and has 2GBs of RAM. I also tried it out on a Dell Inspiron 530S
powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with
an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA
(Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics
Media Accelerator) chip set.“In addition, I tried, and failed, to get it to install on
VirtualBox, Oracle’s desktop virtualization program. This turned
out to be a known problem with VirtualBox and Fedora 14 betas.
There are ways to work around it, however. I was finally successful
in installing Fedora 14 on a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) using
Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to remotely connect to Fedora’s
Xserver, but I can’t see many people jumping through this many
hoops to get it to run on VirtualBox. I was, I should add, able to
run Fedora 14 on VMware Player.”